‘My hopes weren’t high, even to begin with, so I felt no bitterness when He didn’t reveal Himself’
Between the ages of nine and fourteen, I sat in church each Sunday, waiting for God. My hopes weren’t high, even to begin with, so I felt no bitterness when He didn’t reveal Himself, merely bemusement at what all those prayers had been in aid of. If honest piety couldn’t flush Him out, even as…
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‘We meet at various points in the great swathes of the past that neither of us were alive to witness.’
Allen Bratton on a daytrip to a castle with his older boyfriend.
‘Listening to three white poets, whom I suspect are academics, talk about the state of poetry.’
Oluwaseun Olayiwola eavesdrops on an older generation.
‘I’d been dubious about his company at first.’
Sarah Moss on watching Shakespeare with her twelve-year-old son.
‘She didn’t trust us because, to her, tenants were like children.’
Kate Zambreno on negotiating with her older landlady.
‘A moment now swallowed in embarrassment, I asked a question only a young person might ask an older one.’
Lynne Tillman on trying to understand what makes a generation.
‘If there is one image that has dominated our notion of English poetry since 1945 it is that of restraint.’
‘One by one they’re led into the box. They swear their oath. They confirm their name, their employment, why they were where they say they were, what it was they saw.’
‘When young, we were impatient with our parents: now we want to atone for our callowness, to take measure of them, to understand which parts of them live on in us.’
Between the ages of nine and fourteen, I sat in church each Sunday, waiting for...
‘I'd already begun to suspect that sex brought misery or death, and now I knew.’
John Kaag, author of Hiking with Nietzsche, camps out in the mountains of the Engadine where Nietzsche wrote Thus Spoke Zarathustra.
